Dave Lawler

I don't think we're going to have Marines landing

uh, in, um, you know, in, in Tehran and any sort of numbers, but I do think, uh, we're talking, you know, assuming this goes ahead and it looks like that's where we're headed.

We're talking about, um, days and weeks of, uh, missile strikes, airstrikes, um, you know, potentially, uh, uh, operations that, that Israeli officials and some in the white house hope,

will pose a real challenge to the stability of the Iranian regime.

So we basically looked at all that and said we didn't think that there was the kind of robust public and congressional debate that you might expect ahead of something of this magnitude, that it had been kind of a sideshow.

And obviously, the reaction to our piece suggests that people agreed with them.

Yeah, you know, I think, Don, you can sort of go into the nesting dolls of everything's a distraction from something else, right?

This is a distraction from Minneapolis, which was a distraction from whatever the thing was before that.

Yeah.

So, I mean, from my viewpoint, this is something that has been evolving since January.

And I again, I have not been in the room.

I was talking about being in the room with the president.

I haven't been in the room.

Of course, our reporters are talking to folks who are in the room.

But my read on this is this has evolved from January when Trump thought about pulling the trigger on strikes and didn't.

and he decided to hold these talks, but at the same time, he decided to send all of these military assets to the region.

Over the course of the intervening weeks, the expectations for either a deal or a strike, Trump has laid that out, basically said,

we wanna get a deal, that's priority number one, but if we can't, we're gonna have to do something else.

We all know what something else is, it's military action, right?

The expectation has grown higher and higher, the firepower has grown higher and higher, and it's gotten to the point where, honestly, the folks in the region